Junzo Uchiyama & Peter Jordan, Exploring Prehistoric 'Disasterscapes' in Southwestern Japan through Animal Bones.

Abstract: The new VR Research Project “Surviving The Apocalypse”, hosted by Lund University, conducts an interdisciplinary analysis of one of the largest natural disasters to impact the global human community in the past 30,000 years: the Kikai-Akahoya (K-Ah) volcanic super-eruption. K-Ah occurred in Southwestern Japan and devastated societies and landscapes across East Asia approximately 7,300 years ago (7.3 ka) during the foraging Jomon Era. 

The project aims to understand how environmental shocks affected multi-species human lifeworlds and to assess their long-term social-ecological legacies, adopting interdisciplinary methods that include zooarchaeology. In this seminar, I will discuss the future direction of zooarchaeological research within catastrophe archaeology, focusing on ongoing analyses of faunal assemblages in Southwestern Japan to explore shifts in multi-species ecology, culinary traditions, and settlement patterns induced by K-Ah.